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Comment by omnimus | Hacker News Reader

I would say it's a lot more than 500%. If your business is based on doing things that are illegal under GDPR then the cost of doing that startup is close to infinite. But that's kinda the point of GDPR.

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This. Sure, it's X% more difficult to do Y in Europe, because Europe doesn't want you to do Y, either at all, or unless you clean up after yourself so the costs aren't just eaten up by the environment or whatever, or unless you do it without causing harm. That's not a problem. That's the system working as intended.

Sure, Europe doesn't have it's own Microsoft, probably because of regulations like this, but I don't want Europe to have its own Microsoft, because Microsoft, for the most part, sucks.

> That's not a problem. That's the system working as intended.

You really think that supra-national legislators regulating the fine-print of unfathomably complex systems manage to have everything working "as intended"?

Why do Draghi or the EC want to roll back this mess then, other than the evident loss of competitiveness respective of the blocs who did not do this? Was that intended or foreseen?

> You really think that supra-national legislators regulating the fine-print of unfathomably complex systems manage to have everything working "as intended"?

For values of, yes. Things obviously aren't perfect, but I at-least generally prefer them over their proposed alternatives. I find they have made things better.

> Why do Draghi or the EC want to roll back this mess then, other than the evident loss of competitiveness respective of the blocs who did not do this? Was that intended or foreseen?

From the article:

> Under intense pressure from industry and the US government,

I think that says what needs to be said. And my opinion is that they shouldn't yield to US government and industry interests, since they clearly aren't the same as European interests.

I mean Europe doesn't really get to make the choices when it comes to the USA because of their hilarious practice of hamstringing themselves. If that was the goal it definitely worked.

Draghi's recommendations to roll back regulations had nothing to do with purported special interests, but with his view that regulation was stifling European development. And he's as old guard Euro-establishment as they come.

I think what they mean is that what EU in general kinda knows that for various they won't be able to make their version of money machine big tech. So why not to try different path? The individual laws will always be flawed because there is huge pressure to make them flawed by corps and lobby that want's to exploit them.

But if you ask anyone in europe on the street they have no sympathy for big tech. If anything they want stronger GDPR and more of it.

Europe does have Microsoft. Actually, it has Microsoft in almost every single respect except the primary beneficial ones: taxes, employment and oversight.

Yes, and I wish we'd give them the boot for not following the relevant regulations.

Europe having its own Microsoft might be better than Europe having to use the US one and sending it like $100/user/yr in whatever subscription they've tricked them into.

Europe doesn't have to use the US one. It's been the easier choice historically, but there's little beyond inertia forcing Europe to stick to Microsoft. Not that that inertia isn't nothing though.

There is also political lobby and even more importantly local businesses that are build around microsoft. From one person to huge companies all exist to support microsoft. It would be extremely costly to retrain/regear everyone involved. So the inertia is huge.

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